He nodded. “Glad to hear it.”
He was more than glad, but he didn’t have the right words for his relief and his happiness and his fervent wish that…that something. He didn’t even know what. He hadn’t known when he called Hell this morning to ask her for help. He hadn’t known when he stood in Purkiss’s office and told the man that the girls were sneaking off to an influential ballet donor’s house to use her private studio at night. And he hadn’t known when he left Tamsin a short note in her tote bag explaining the lie—that Purkiss had bought it and that Hell was there to back up every part.
If he had to call it anything, he might call it a willful daydream. There was nothing more between him and Tamsin now, and yet he could not let go of this idea—this sweet illusion—that there might be. That she might look at his older, scarred body and see something she wanted more of.
“Cal,” Tamsin said. “We want to thank you now.”
“Okay,” he said, trying to look at the rest of them without actually looking at them. “You’re welcome.”
One of the ballerinas—Ellie, maybe—giggled.
Tamsin came up to him and slid her hands up his chest, lacing her fingers around his neck. She went up easily on the toes of her shoes to do it, and the small act was so erotic that he had to close his eyes. The brush of her belly against the semi-hardness of his erection was undoing him, turning his cock to full stone.
“Tamsin,” he said, opening his eyes. It was maybe a plea or an admission, but it wasn’t a command. She had all the power tonight and she knew it.
“I want to play another game,” she whispered.
“I don’t want to play any kind of game that might—” he paused, not wanting to reveal too much of his own feelings. He couldn’t say, that might ruin anything between us. There wasn’t anything real between them. She was young and unattached and had her whole life ahead of her. She didn’t need a washed-up soldier like him pestering her with unwanted advances.
She pressed her soft lips to his jaw, and he fought the urge to close his eyes again. “I want you to be with all of us. Please.”
He kept his voice low, gazing down into her silver eyes. “It’s not nothing, watching someone you’ve fucked fuck other people. There’s no coming back from something like this.”
“Good,” she replied, kissing his jaw again. “I don’t want there to be.”
I’m afraid there won’t be a future for us if I let it happen, was what he wanted to tell her. But he couldn’t, couldn’t bring the weight of his daydreams to bear against her, and yet he also couldn’t consent to this. It was a stalemate.
Until, that is, Tamsin reached down and pressed a slender hand to his cock. Even through the thick denim of his jeans, there was no mistaking how hard he was. He pushed his hips into her touch with a low grunt, and she smiled.
“Come on, Cal,” she coaxed. “You can say stop when you need to stop.”
The idea of him needing saving from a bedroom full of agreeable ballerinas was ludicrous and almost pulled a smile onto his face. But not quite. He was still too preoccupied with Tamsin, despite the whispers and sighs of the waiting dancers around them.
“But I’m worried about you needing to stop,” he told her quietly. “I’m worried about you.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Is this some kind of male thing where you think I won’t get anything out of this? Or that my feelings will be hurt by seeing you fuck someone else?”
“No to the first,” Cal answered. “And yes to the second. I know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think you’d get something out of this, but I would feel selfish if I agreed. Selfish and unthinking. I don’t want to be that around you.”
She ran her palm along his length, up and down, up and down, until he could hardly breathe. “This is fun for me,” she said finally. “I like this. What I get out of it is the same thing I got out of last night. My feelings are only going to be hurt if you stop us from enjoying something we both want—just to be noble.”
Noble. That was a word he hadn’t used to describe himself in a very long time. Maybe ever. “Dammit, Tamsin, I’m not trying to be noble,” he said, as if his rock-hard cock left any doubt about that. “I just want you to still like me after the night is over.”
“Oh Cal,” Tamsin murmured. She pulled away to look at him, and the loss of her touch on his dick had him nearly gnawing at his lip in agony. “I already so much more than like you.”
Jesus. Her words bit him where he was vulnerable.
“Take a leap and trust me,” she continued, still looking up into his eyes. “Join me in my dream.”
It felt like that was all he’d ever wanted to do since the day he was born. He wrapped his hands around her jaw and pulled her face close to his. “Okay,” he whispered. And then he kissed her, trying to pour every last feeling and fledgling hope into his kiss, so that she knew that she’d somehow become the most important person in his life over the course of a week. He couldn’t tell her that, he couldn’t act on it, he felt guilty even hoping around it. You didn’t watch a girl through a camera lens and fall in love, you didn’t play blackmail games with her and like it, you didn’t fuck a girl once and wish for more unless you knew she wanted it too.
And yet.
He’d been kissing Tamsin so thoroughly and so deeply that he hadn’t been aware of the other dancers inching closer until a hand brushed against his back. And another hand. And another. Too many hands. His entire body sang with hunger, but the knot in his chest necessitated that he refuse to respond. Instead he murmured against Tamsin’s lips, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Trust me,” she said.
And he took a deep breath and joined her in her dream.
*
The first thing that happened was the kiss to his shoulder. He turned to see one of the ballerinas—Latinx, dark-eyed, Nina was her name—smiling up at him. It had been so long since he’d fucked a woman before Tamsin, and now the idea of fucking several women at once was almost laughable. Like he’d actually tripped and fallen into fairyland for real.
Tamsin stepped forward and took his hand, pressing it hard against Nina’s small breast with its dark, erect nipple. “Don’t be shy,” Tamsin said to Cal. “We all want this. Do you?”
He did. Whichever that made him, man or monster, he wanted it.
Tamsin kissed him again, her tongue teasing at his lower lip until he opened to her, and then, with his hand still on Nina’s breast, he slid his other hand around Tamsin’s waist and pulled her tight against him.
“I want you close,” he said against her mouth. “You be here with me, do it with me. Got it?”
She nodded, and he gave her a final rough kiss before he turned his attention to Nina. She purred as he thumbed her nipple and then lowered his mouth to her neck. She tasted different than Tamsin, who was all rose and delicacy. Nina was lavender, elegant, more grown-up smelling somehow, even though Tamsin was the oldest.